Essays From The Big Read
Students and Vets Wrote About Tim O’Brien
n October, the Santa Barbara Public Libraries, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, presented The Big Read with author Tim O’Brien. Thanks to the Endowment and private donors, 2,500 copies of O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried were distributed, primarily to area high school students, but also to veterans organizations and other interested groups. As a result, thousands of readers, young and old, were introduced to O’Brien’s work in time for his visit to Santa Barbara during the week of October 21.
O’Brien met with students and veterans at UCSB, SBCC, Santa Barbara High School, and Laguna Blanca School. For many, the highlight of his visit was the public lecture that he gave at Santa Barbara Junior High School’s Marjorie Luke Theatre on Wednesday, October 23. That lecture was videotaped and will be shown on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on TVSB, channel 71. It is also available as a DVD that can be checked out from the Main Library.
As part of The Big Read Program, students and veterans were invited to submit essays in response to O’Brien’s novel and lecture for a contest, with the winner to be published in The S.B. Independent. Student essays were prescreened by their high school teachers, and the judges for the contest were Hap Freund, The Big Read Outreach Coordinator, and Beverly Schwartzberg, the Library’s director of Adult Literacy Programs. They determined that the following essays should be honored.
